There was the queen of state visits and the queen of private time. With very different hobbies. During her official visits to France, Elizabeth II spent a lot of time in museums and opera houses. During her three private stays, on the other hand, she favored castles and horses, her favorite animal. A way to reveal what she preferred about French culture. Diplomats, the French presidents have gradually adapted their program, in order to satisfy His Majesty.
Princess Elizabeth, who speaks exquisite French thanks to the lessons of her governess, the Belgian Viscountess Marie-Antoinette de Bellaigue, gives an idea of her preferences during her first official visit to Paris in 1948. On May 15, the young woman 22 years old, major for only one year, discovers the Palace of Versailles. Here she is in the 17th century apartments, in the rooms of the Entente Cordiale, in the north attic, where paintings representing the history of the visits made by Queen Victoria to Louis-Philippe are exhibited. In front of a portrait of her grandfather George V, then in the Hall of Mirrors, she stops for a moment, as if stunned. To the curator of the castle, she confided: “I am happy to finally see these places that I dreamed of in my childhood.” During the same trip, the princess expressed the desire… to attend a performance of the Dirty hands, the play by Jean-Paul Sartre, at the Antoine theater in Paris. About thirty places are reserved by the embassy, which tries at the same time to dissuade His Highness from going there. In the middle of the Cold War, this mark of interest for a Marxist philosopher, who was then trying to imagine a third way to the left between reformism and Stalinism, would risk causing a diplomatic incident. Especially since it is not customary for the royal family to give political advice. At the insistence of her diplomats, the princess gives up. We won’t take it again. From now on, his Parisian night outings will most often take place at the opera.
During her second visit to Paris, the first as monarch, from April 8 to 11, 1957, Elizabeth II returned to the Palace of Versailles, where she changed her outfit in Marie-Antoinette’s room. President René Coty had him give a sumptuous banquet in the Hall of Mirrors. Beforehand, the British protocol service warned that the queen eats everything except caviar, oysters and shellfish. He is served supreme of woodcock and cardinal from the Armorican seas. Two days later, dinner takes place at the Louvre, in the Salle des Caryatids, where a staircase has been specially drilled under the Sully vault to facilitate service. Paintings by Rubens and Vermeer, favorites at the Mona Lisa, were placed in the room. On this occasion, the queen is surprised that she is offered “Périgourdin hedgehog in the nest”, before being informed that it is a foie gras. She tastes the dish so much that she will be served foie gras on each of her visits to France.
Horse expert
Foie gras, Louvre and Versailles… The Queen’s state visits to Paris follow one another and often resemble each other. Conversely, when she goes to France in private, which happens to her three times, the sovereign indulges in other hobbies. From May 26 to 29, 1967, Elizabeth II visited eight stud farms in Sarthe and Normandy. On this occasion, she stays at the castle of Sassy, in the Orne. Twenty years later, in May 1987, she again visited several Norman stud farms, including that of Alec Head, a friend of the royal family, and went for a walk in Deauville (Calvados), for a weekend. “What amazed me was her knowledge of horses, horse models and their origins. She could talk for hours about their pedigrees,” recalls Philippe Augier, the mayor of Deauville, who told her. approached. Heads of State have always tried to integrate horse-related events into their visitation programme. On May 16, 1972, during his second state visit to France, President Pompidou organized a gala evening at the Champ-de-Mars, in Paris, during which the military cavalrymen of the Cadre Noir de Saumur performed a demonstration. The monarch is conquered. During the same stay, she went to the races at the Longchamp racecourse then, on May 18, in the village of Les Baux-de-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône. The queen is greeted there by a thoroughbred from the riding club, who has been trained to bow to her. Las!, His Majesty, trained by the officials, does not notice the feat. On April 6, 2004, during the Queen’s fourth state visit, the French presidency offered a new performance by the Cadre Noir, in the Célestins barracks of the Republican Guard.
Another of Elizabeth II’s French pleasures was visiting the medieval castles that dot our country. In 1979, she took a private trip to the region of the Loire castles. Between October 24 and 26, she admired the Château de Chambord (Loir-et-Cher), that of Chenonceaux (Indre-et-Loire), in the presence of Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing, wife of the head of the ‘French State. Then she goes to the Château d’Epoisses, the hospices of Beaune and the basilica of Vézelay, in the Yonne. Already in 1972, she had insisted on visiting the Palace of the Popes in Avignon and had confided to the curator that her mother, Queen Consort Elizabeth, had often spoken to her about this building, the seat of Christianity in the 14th century.
House of the Violet
A lover of floriculture, the monarch had also taken to strolling through the French flower markets, of which she marveled at the beauty. As early as 1948, the young princess walked with Prince Philip to the market on the Ile de la Cité. Nine years later, in 1957, she surveyed the flower market of the Grand’Place in Lille. Then in 2004, passing through Toulouse, she went to the Maison de la Violette, a specialized shop located on a barge. Hélène Vié, the shopkeeper, is surprised to see her arrive… fully dressed in purple. For his last state visit, in 2014, French officials offered him to return to the Ile de la Cité, and the town hall made an exception to its policy of never naming public places after a living personality. : the flower market will henceforth be called Elizabeth II. An elegant tribute to Franco-British friendship.